A Graphical Editor for the Conceptual Design of Business Rules

At the conceptual level, business rules are formulated from an external observation perspective according to the event-condition-action structure of rules in active database systems. Business rules express how an external observer could monitor calendar time and the database state to recognize prede ned situations and to react to them accordingly. Modeling such business rules requires concepts that are not yet appropriately provided by current prototypes of active objectoriented database systems and recent approaches to active object-oriented database design (cf. [3]). Situation/Activation Diagrams homogeneously extend Object/Behavior Diagrams [1] to a graphical notation for the conceptual design of business objects and their associated business rules.